Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (81 page)

I walked over and was intercepted in the parking lot by Nelson Forrest himself, energetically on his way somewhere else. I rather nervously explained what I was after, using the whole professor bit, interested in the work, etc., still saying nothing about
Harper’s
, or any national article. But here, finally, after two weeks of fruitless phone calls looking for sources, looking for reporterly access to the world of worming, I had someone live to talk to. Mr. Forrest seemed preoccupied, even a little annoyed, but once he got me in his office — thin paneling, tidy old desk, real oil paintings (appealingly amateur), smell of the sea, a phone, a fax — he leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, became voluble, answering questions I hadn’t asked: “State law says the worms must be dug by hand.” He’s well tanned and much creased, his eyes blue as the sky over Cadillac Mountain on Mt. Desert Island (pronounced dessert), which is due south, just across Frenchman Bay. To folks in Wiscasset, Wormville is Down East. To folks Down East, Wormville is Midcoast. Wiscasset might as well be Massachusetts.

Mr. Forrest stares intently at me, talks rapidly, explains the business, answering his own questions: “We pay ten cents a worm for bloods. Six cents for sands. Up in Wiscasset they’re paying twelve cents, but they have less shipping cost.” The diggers, whom Forrest carefully calls independent contractors, bring the worms to one of ten or fifteen dealers — places like Gulf of Maine Bait — for counting, starting about an hour after low water. “They’ll stagger in for hours after that,” he says, then corrects himself: “Well, not stagger, exactly.” On vinyl-covered tables the men (and a few women) count bloods rapidly into wooden trays of 250, then fill out a card:

250 BLOOD WORMS

dug and counted by:

Forrest also deals sandworms, but far fewer: “I hate sandworms; they’re so frigging fragile. They’ll die if you look at ’em.” He transfers the worms to newspaper-and-seaweed-lined cardboard flats, where they rest in the walk-in cooler to wait for the worm van, a service provided by several independent shippers (Great Northern Seafood, for one example: “Worm Transit, Maine to Maryland”). Nelson’s worms — three thousand to fifteen thousand a day — are driven to Logan airport, and from there flown to points south (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina), west (California, especially Sacramento), and east (Mediterranean France, Spain, and Italy). “It’s a unique business. You tell people you sell worms…they look at you.” The wholesale buyers are either distributors who service bait shops or the captains of fishing charters. The final price out there in the world — some guy fishing for sea bass or spot or weakfish or flounder — is in the range of three to four dollars a dozen. Mr. Forrest nods proudly. “They do catch fish. See, they’re two-thirds blood. Maybe it’s the scent, we don’t know.” His competition, in his estimation, isn’t other worm dealers, really, but twenty-four other ocean baits including eels, sea clams, herring, and squid. Of these, squid is probably the most effective, and, unlike worms, can be frozen for shipment, then frozen again by the fisherman after partial use. “Worms aren’t the distributors’ favorite,” Mr. Forrest says. “They die, they’re expensive…but they need ’em.”

Terrible years, good years, the business seems to go on, though not like the old days. Nelson Forrest, who has never dug worms himself, wriggled into worming back in 1972 — boom times. He shakes his head about the terrible years of the late eighties — tiny worms, and not many — won’t venture a theory as to where the big ones went, though (like every cycle in business and nature), the sea-worm cycle does have its theorists. Pollution plays a role in many of these visions, overharvesting in others. Global warming gets a nod, and one strident wormer I talked to up near Wiscasset invoked Chernobyl (but oddly not the defunct Yankee nuclear facility, which is right in Wiscasset’s backyard). Some don’t see doom, particularly, just the well-known fact that sea worms are unpredictable. Some years there are plenty of big ones, the kind the fishermen like, some years there just ain’t. Nelson Forrest would like to see some conservation — maybe close the mud in winter, maybe think more about size limits. “It’s a constant battle to keep the guys out of the little ones…and we don’t buy on Sundays.” He pauses, considers. “Though that’s no conservation measure; the guys just refrigerate Sunday worms, bring ’em in Monday.” Then he shakes his head, lights the fifth cigarette of our conversation. “When I started, I worried I’d be out of worms in ten years.” He looks at me carefully, to see that I’m not missing the point, shakes his head again. “But we’re running out of fish first. The fish are gone. Pollution, commercial overfishing, this frigging economy — they do destroy sportfishing.” And where sportfishing goes, the wormers will go.

That afternoon there’s a 2:30 tide, and Mr. Forrest sets me up with one of his crews, the group I have been calling the Midcoast boys, these fellows who, I’ll later learn, are practically worming poster boys they’ve been on TV so much. They love nothing more but jazzing a guy with a tie and a microphone. The wormers know something most reporters won’t admit: they’re getting used. But torturing a reporter for a tide can make up for it, make time fly.

One of the crew, my guide, gets me to follow him in my own vehicle — sixty miles an hour on back roads to one Thompson Island. I watch his head turn at every sight of the water; he’s checking the size of the tide, driving off the road. We park on the main drag into Bar Harbor in front of an enormous fence that hides a gargantuan house.

After I’ve donned my flyfishing boots in the face of my guide’s skeptical impatience (but no warnings), he trots me past two No Trespassing signs and through the summer-dink lawn, around a summer-dink gate and past two more summer-dink property signs, then along an old lane through a quiet wood, shore pines and pin oaks, lots of poison ivy. Past the fifth and sixth No Trespassing signs we break into a little meadow that is on a point thrust into the Mount Desert Narrows. Trap Rock is in sight, and Thomas Island. Seals play out there. There’s a strong onshore breeze, the sound of waves crashing, white sprays of foam thrown up on rocks out there. It’s gorgeous.

In the cover of some scruffy pines and under yet another No Trespassing sign, three grim guys await. My guide offers no introductions. I pull out my little notebook filled with little questions to ask, but every one of them looks and sounds like it was written at four in the morning in the worst motel in Ellsworth.

We all of us stand among boulders and birch trees and watch the tide, which for me means picking out a particular rock and keeping track of how wet it is.

I smile my rube’s smile. “So what are your all’s names?”

Nothing.

“You. Hi. Where do you live?”

Nada.

“How much can a good wormer expect to make on the average tide?”

Silence.

“Ever get into fights over territory?”

Here we go. They all look at me. My guide says, “Old days you’d have a hell of brawl. Now we see guys from Wiscasset or someplace, we might holler some.”

“Tell ’em to go the fuck home,” the next guy says, real fury.

My guide says, “Used to be you’d shoot holes in a guy’s boat.”

Another gently says, “Tires do get slashed. But some years the worms are one place and not another and fellows travel.”

“Where’re you from?” the go-the-fuck-home guy says. Everyone looks at me closely.

Me, I don’t say a thing, just look out at the tide.

“He’s from the college,” my guide says. “Farmington, up there.”

“I thought only queers lived up that way!”

I’m supposed to defend Farmington, I guess. But I don’t. What am I going to say? Well, yes, we have some gay citizens, of course, about 10 percent, I believe, something along those lines, same as Wormville, same as anywhere. Nice folks, our queers!

We stand on the rocks. We watch the tide. The breeze itself feels tense, carries drops of rain. Where’s the story? I don’t say a word. The men around me stiffen.

Shop talk saves the day. My guide says, “She gonna go out?”

The gentle man says, “Somewhat, I think.” That onshore wind will keep the tide small.

The angry fellow says, “Probably under eight feet.”

My guide: “Shit tide.”

The angry fellow: “I’ll give you ten bucks you bail out the bay.”

They all snigger and have a look at me to see if I believe that’s possible. I notice for the first time that the silent man is a young teen. He looks as if he feels sorry for me. I love him for that, gangly kid. He stands half behind the protection of his dad’s back (his dad is the gentle one), holding a bloodworm hoe (six tines nine inches long, short wooden handle), dangles it at the end of one limp arm, an empty joint-compound bucket dangles at the end of the other, the tools of the trade looking like mittens someone has pinned to his jacket.

“You like worming?” I ask him inanely.

“I’m just doing it so my dad don’t get pissed off when I ask for money.”

His dad doesn’t laugh, stares the boy down.

Around a corner on the rocky mud toward the mainland a lone figure comes aslogging, a stately, slow march through the muck, his bucket in one hand, hoe in the other. On shore he’d look weary; on firm land he’d look gimpy and stiff; on dry land he’d be another old salt spitting stories; but on the flats there’s a grandeur about him. He pauses and looks at the mud, continues on, pauses and looks at the mud, stoops, begins to dig. His style is large, operatic: big strokes, very slowly made. He doesn’t seem to be turning up many worms. “He’s way inside,” the angry man says.

“It’s Binky Farmer,” my guide says. “He’s seventy-seven years old, that one.” “Way inside,” the angry one repeats, but no one else seems to want to indict old Binky, whose only pension is a tide a day.

“Shoot him,” the angry one says. “I mean it. Shoot him. It’s the ethics of the thing.”

My guide says, “It’s not Binky who should be shot. It’s these schoolteachers who come along in summah, trying to strike it rich during their taxpayer vacation.”

All the boys turn subtly. Binky’s off the spot. I’m back on. They eye me closely.

I pull out my pen, my little notebook, write down chunks of conversation, to remind everyone what I’m here for.

My guide looks on curiously, but no way he’ll penetrate my handwriting.

He offers a quote, is visibly pleased when I write it down: “We’ll all need boats before long with all these No Trespassing signs.”

“Fucking summer dinks,” says the angry one. “Just try to keep me off this fucking point!” He swipes his rake at the air. “I been coming out here since I was seven.” He swipes the rake in my direction again, for emphasis, ready to pop my summer-dink skull, find the worm with in.

We watch the tide. It’s going nowhere at all.

Five more wormers come into the meadow. No greetings, just nods, men who’ve known each other a long time. The new fellows take note of a stranger’s presence, remain utterly silent, drift off to watch the tide from their own vantage points around the point. The rest of us watch the bay, watch the sky, watch old Binky as he straightens up, rests; we watch the seagulls, watch the island out there, watch as Binky goes back to work. Suddenly, no word said, they’re all rolling up their sleeves. Suddenly, the tide is right. I can’t find my indicator rock — suddenly there are a million rocks. The new guys are off and moving through the mud. The father-and-son team hike off across the meadow to the other side of the neck, disappear. I had hoped to work near them, in the warmth of their kindness. My guide and the angry fellow step over the seaweed-covered rocks and into the mud right in front of us. Resolutely I follow, uninvited. It may not be much of a tide, it may not be deep mud, but after a short twenty minutes, I’m stuck good.

The angry guy looks back, laughs, shouts something.

“What?” I shout.

“I said, ‘You are a queer!’ ”

“Leave him for the tide,” my guide shouts. The two of them are laughing hard, moving away from me.

“What?” I shout.

“Mud eel bite your cock off!” says the angry guy.

“What?” I shout.

“He won’t get but four cents for that worm!”

I’m alone. I struggle, still sinking. I drop my notebook, reach for it, lose my pen. I thrash after the notebook, quickly exhausted, then lose my hat, lose my sunglasses. I don’t want to lose my Orvis wading boots, but after a struggle, I do lose them, abandon them there in the mud, socks too. The notebook is the one thing I manage to recover, and with it stuffed in my shirt I crawl and slither and drag myself to a rock near shore, pull myself puffing up onto it, sit heavily, watch the wormers move out and away chopping at the mud, warmed to their work, no thought of me in their heads.

“Fucking queers!” I shout. I’m reaching for an insult they might mind.

But they can’t hear me. They’re already hundreds of yards away in the wind, which comes at my face.

“Fucking winter dinks!”

They don’t even turn their heads.

I drag myself rock to rock through the mud and to shore and slog my way back up the point through the yard of the summer mansion. All the No Trespassing signs have been torn down, torn to bits by those fellows who came after, strewn in bits everywhere along the way as if by some furious wind.

Dicky Butts’s wife drives the town school bus, part time. Health insurance? No way. Pension plan? Ha. They live in town, a quiet and genuine Maine place, a working town — no stores, no tourist facilities — just a village made of houses and trailers and shacks and sheds. Dicky’s good little house is neatly kept, painted blue, on a small piece of an old family lot. His grandmother lives nearby, and his sister too, and his mom and dad, and his aunts and uncles and cousins and many a good friend. Their propinquity is his security, his insurance, his retirement plan.

Truey’s house is on a corner of the property down by the road, next turn up from the worm shed. It’s a small place, a ranch house, bedrooms in the basement. In the yard he’s got an old army truck rebuilt to serve as a log skidder, huge tires draped with tractor chains — winter work. There are logs everywhere. Some cut, some tree length, all of them a season old, valuably waiting. Beside the skidder is his speedway trailer — high rack of worn racing slicks — leaning into the weather. The car itself, the estimable number five, is in a home-built garage, and in the garage is where you’ll find Truey and Dicky most high tides, mired in oil, changing engines, packing bearings, knocking out dents (of which in number five there are always plenty). Behind the garage in tall grass are a couple of car bodies — what’s left of wrecks Truman and Dicky have used as parts for the racer. And there’s kid stuff for the little boys — plenty of toys, a swing set, a play pool. Truey’s wife is a nurse at the hospital in Calais, fifteen miles down Route 1. Her job provides the family with health insurance and a retirement plan. Her job also gives insurance of another kind: proof against bad worming.